Code 002

It is quite possible, of course, that I learned nothing from code, that any lessons that I discern now are simply self-serving – enabling me to shape a productive relation to an experience that could equally be represented as one of loss. I had an unbalanced commitment to programming. I couldn’t let problems go. I could devote days and weeks to solving minor technical issues – perhaps with the sense that something was being built (however slowly and painstakingly), but also with a willingness to just abandon myself to the task.

It seems to me then that I also need to make sense of this aspect of unproductive expenditure – the neurotic, obsessive, wasteful and misdirected relationship to code.

[I wonder if programming enabled a certain suspension of time? Of ordinary mortal time? Programming provided no actual immortality. It didn’t even suspend the everyday exigencies of time, but it represented a strange priority that distanced me from my accustomed temporal scales related to the length of the working day, the balance between work and leisure, the attention to human relationships, etc.]